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Robert Aldrich | |
|---|---|
| Born | Robert Burgess Aldrich August 9, 1918 Cranston, Rhode Island, U.S. |
| Died | December 5, 1983 (aged 65) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Resting place | Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) |
| Occupations | |
| Years active | 1945–1981 |
| Spouse(s) |
Harriet Foster
(m. 1941; div. 1965)Sibylle Siegfried
(m. 1966; "his death" is deprecated; use "died" instead. 1983) |
| Children | 4 (with Foster) |
Robert Burgess Aldrich (August 9, 1918 – December 5, 1983) was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. His notable credits include Vera Cruz (1954), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Big Knife (1955), Autumn Leaves (1956), Attack (1956), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Longest Yard (1974).
Aldrich was portrayed by Alfred Molina in the anthology television series Feud (2017), which received highly positive reviews.
Robert Burgess Aldrich was born in Cranston, Rhode Island into a family of wealth and social prominence - “The Aldrich’s of Rhode Island”.[1] His mother, Lora Elsie née Lawson of New Hampshire (1874-1931), died when Aldrich was 13 and was remembered with fondness by her son. His father, Edward Burgess Aldrich (1871-1957) was a newspaper publisher and an influential operative in state Republican politics. Ruth Aldrich Kaufinger (1912-1987) was his elder sister and only sibling.[2]
Among his notable ancestors were the American Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene and the theologian Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island Colony.[3]
His grandfather, Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, was a self-made millionaire and art investor. A Republican member of the US Senate for thirty years (1881-1911) he was dubbed “General Manager of the Nation” by the press for his dominant role in framing federal monetary policy.[4][5]
A number of Aldrich’s paternal uncles had impressive careers, among them a successful investment banker, a noted architect and Harvard instructor, a member of the US House of Representatives, and a chairman of the Chase-Manhattan Bank who also served as the US Ambassador to Great Britain. An aunt, Abigail Greene "Abby" Aldrich Rockefeller married John D. Rockefeller Jr., scion of the Standard Oil fortune. Nelson Rockefeller, a four-term governor of New York State and US Vice-President to Gerald Ford, was the director’s first cousin.[6][7]
As the only male heir to Lawson-Aldrich family line, Aldrich was under considerable pressure to compete successfully with his numerous cousins in a family of high achievers.[8] Following family tradition and expectations, Aldrich was educated at Moses Brown School inProvidence. There he served as Captain of the track and football teams and was elected president of his senior class. Failing to matriculate to Yale due to mediocre grades, Aldrich attended University of Virginia, majoring in economics. He continued to excel in sports and played a leading role in campus clubs and fraternities.[9][10]
During the Great Depression the adolescent Aldrich began to question the justice of his family’s “politics and power” which clashed with his growing sympathies with left-wing social and political movements of the 1930s. Aldrich’s disaffection from Aldrich-Rockefellers right-wing social and political orientation contributed to a growing tension between father and son.[11][12]
Having satisfactorily demonstrated his aptitude for a career in finance, Aldrich defied his father by dropping out of college in his senior year without taking a degree.[6] Aldrich approached his uncle Winthrop who got his 23-year old nephew a job at RKO Studios as production clerk at $25 a week.[13] For this act of defiance, Aldrich was promptly disinherited. Aldrich would reciprocate by expunging public records of his connection with the Aldrich-Rockefeller clan, while stoically accepting the breach. He rarely mentioned or invoked his family thereafter.[14] Indeed, it's been said that "No American film director was born as wealthy as Aldrich — and then so thoroughly cut off from family money."[15][16]
At the age of 23, Aldrich began work at RKO studios as a production clerk, an entry level position, after declining an offer through his Rockefeller connections to enter the studio as an associate producer.[17][18] He married his first wife, Harriet Foster, a childhood sweetheart, shortly before he departed for Hollywood in May 1941.[19][10]
Though the smallest of Hollywood‘s top studios, RKO could boast an impressive roster of directors (George Cukor, John Ford and Howard Hawks) as well as movie stars (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and the Marx Brothers). The 23-year old Aldrich assumed his duties shortly after Orson Welles, 26-years-old, signed a six-movie contract with RKO after the release of widely acclaimed Citizen Kane (1941).[20]
When the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941, Aldrich was inducted into the Air Force Motion Picture Unit, but quickly discharged when an old football injury disqualified him for military service. The film studios manpower shortage allowed Aldrich to win assignments as third or second tier director’s assistant to learn the basics of filmmaking.[21][22] In just two years he participated on two dozen movies with well-known directors, among them the Canadian-American Edward Dmytryk. Towards the end of the war, Aldrich had risen to first assistant director making comedy shorts with director Leslie Goodwins. In 1944, Aldrich departed RKO to begin free-lancing on feature films at other major studios, including Columbia, United Artists and Paramount.[23][24][25]
Aldrich was fortunate to serve as an assistant director to many notable and talented Hollywood filmmakers. During these assignments which spanned nine years, Aldrich gained both practical and aesthetic fundamentals of filmmaking: “set location and atmosphere” (Jean Renoir, The Southerner, 1945), the “techniques of pre-planning a shot” (Lewis Milestone’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1946), “action scenes” (William Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe, 1946), the “importance of communication with actors” (Joseph Losey’s The Prowler, 1951) and “establishing visual empathy between camera and audience” (Charles Chaplin’s Limelight, 1952).[26][24][22]
Aldrich approached these projects and directors with fine a discrimination enabling him to learn from both their strengths and weaknesses.[27]
During these years Aldrich forged lasting professional relationships with talented artists who would serve him throughout his filmmaking career: cinematographer Joseph Biroc, film editor Michael Luciano, music director Frank DeVol, art director William Glasgow and screenwriter Lukas Heller. A troupe of loyal, mostly male, players were enlisted for his film leads and supporting roles: Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Lee Marvin, Eddie Albert, Richard Jaeckel, Wesley Addy, Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson.[28][29]
Aldrich’s association with Enterprise Studios marks the most formative period of his apprenticeship. The production company offered a unique venue independent filmmakers welcoming socially conscious themes critical of authoritarian aspects of American society.[30][31]
While at Enterprise Aldrich established both a professional and a personal affiliation with screenwriter and director Abraham Polonsky, a major figure in 1930s Popular Front movement. Their respective films addressed the issue of an individual’s often desperate struggle to resist destruction by an oppressive society.[32][33]
Enterprise’s Body and Soul (1947), written by Polonsky, directed by Robert Rossen and starring John Garfield made a deep and lasting impression on the 29-year old assistant director from both structural and thematic standpoints. Garfield plays a corrupt prizefighter who seeks to redeem himself by defying mobsters who insist he throw a fight or forfeit his life.[34] While the protagonist's personal failings contribute to his own oppression, the film censures capitalism as a unredeemable system.[35] Aldrich would revisit Body and Soul throughout his career when seeking guidance on how to convey the progressive ideals of the 1930s while working in the reactionary political atmosphere of the Cold War era.[36][37]
"I think anybody with any brains in 1936 to ‘40 would have been a Communist. They were the brightest, they were the quickest, they were the best, and you found working with people of that persuasion more stimulating, more exciting."
Robert Aldrich, recalling the caliber of his associates at The Enterprise Studios just before the Hollywood blacklists.[38][39][40]
In 1948 Aldrich joined Polansky and Garfield on the early noir film, Force of Evil. The story concerns a Wall Street attorney turned mob lawyer (Garfield) who informs on his employers when they murder his brother. Force of Evil’s cinematically excessive visuals and striking sound would later appear in Aldrich’s films Kiss Me Deadly and Twilight's Last Gleaming.[41][42]
A number of Aldrich’s associates at Enterprise came under scrutiny by the HUAC in the late 1940s after Enterprise had closed its doors. Among them were Rossen, Polonsky, Garfield, directors John Berry and Joseph Losey, producer Carl Foreman and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, some of whom suffered blacklisting and imprisonment. Aldrich was never targeted by the authorities despite his collaborations with these artists. This was largely due to his post-1930s entry into the film industry when recruitment by Communist and leftist organizations was declining. Nonetheless, Aldrich remained a champion for the victims of the Red Scare.[43][44]
During his apprenticeship Aldrich developed a keen appreciation for the nexus between autonomous control over every element of picture production and achievement of his creative vision. He would forever strive for full control over his films.[45][46]
By 1952, the 34-year old assistant director, fully prepared to make his directorial debut, no offers materialized in Hollywood.[47] Eager to perform at a journeyman level he moved to New York City to join its television startups. The infant industries’ golden age of live broadcasts was in a primitive stage of organization and producers were pleased to enlist talent from the Hollywood film industry.[48][49] More than merely a career move, television offered Aldrich an opportunity to apply the cinematic skills and concepts he had garnered during his eclectic education in movie-making to an entirely new medium.[50][51]
"All they were paying directors was scale," recalled Aldrich. "Who the hell wanted to go live in New York and work for scale? Only guys that had never directed or couldn't get a shot."[52]
Procter & Gamble hired Aldrich in 1952 to direct episodes of the anthology series, an early soap opera, The Doctor (later retitled The Guest in syndication) starring Warner Anderson. Shooting schedules wee notoriously tight. Despite this, Aldrich routinely dedicated half or more of the allotted time to rehearsals, an immensely reassuring practice for the players, contributing to the efficient execution of the final live shoot.[53][54] Following The Doctor, Aldrich resettled in Hollywood to complete twenty episodes of television’s China Smith starring Dan Duryea, filmed on an even tighter timetable. He also filled in as director on TV's Four Star Playhouse and the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars.[55][56]
Aldrich described the early TV industry as a “director’s crash course” where, unlike feature film production, the overall quality of the series outweighed the success or failure of an individual episode. In his two-year stint in television, Aldrich was free to experiment with technique and narrative schemes that would appear later in his film treatments. As such, he used cinematic framing and composition to reveal character motivation and close ups serving to highlight dialog, all of which endowed his episodes with a polished Hollywood studio-like appearance. Aldrich avoided disparaging television as an art form, only regretting its “rushed schedules and lack of preparation time.”[57][58]
Aldrich broke into feature films as a director when his television and sports experience saw him recommended to do a low budget baseball film for MGM, Big Leaguer (1953).
The film was not particularly successful so Aldrich returned to television. He directed episodes of the television series China Smith with Dan Duryea. Aldrich used many of the same sets and cast in a low-budget feature World for Ransom (1954) which he produced and directed.
This film was seen by Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster who had worked with Aldrich on some of their earlier films. They were impressed and hired Aldrich to direct Apache (1954), a Western starring Lancaster as an Apache fighter.
This film was a big hit and so Hecht and Lancaster used Aldrich again on Vera Cruz (1954), a Western starring Gary Cooper and Lancaster. It was even more successful at the box office than Apache and Aldrich was now firmly established as a director.
The success of these movies enabled Aldrich to turn producer for his next movies. Kiss Me Deadly (1955) was a film noir based on a novel by Mickey Spillane starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer.
The Big Knife (1955) was based on a play by Clifford Odets about a movie star played by Jack Palance.
Aldrich accepted a straight directorial assignment, the Joan Crawford melodrama Autumn Leaves (1956), made at Columbia.
Following this, Aldrich adapted another play for his own company, Attack (1956), a war film based on a play, starring Palance and Lee Marvin.
Aldrich worked on The Garment Jungle (1957), but was fired during filming. He was unable to get a job until he had an offer from Hammer Films and Seven Arts to make Ten Seconds to Hell (1959) in Germany, starring Palance and Jeff Chandler.[59] While there, he was head of the jury at the 9th Berlin International Film Festival.[60]
Aldrich stayed in Europe to make The Angry Hills (1959) for MGM in Greece, starring Robert Mitchum.
Aldrich returned to Hollywood to make a modern day Western, The Last Sunset (1961), starring Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson.
He then went back to Italy where he directed a Biblical spectacular, Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) for Joseph E. Levine.
Aldrich optioned the novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and turned it into a film featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as spiteful sisters and faded child-actresses. It was a massive hit and restored Aldrich's commercial reputation.
He made a comic Western with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, 4 for Texas (1963), then did a follow up to Baby Jane, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), with Bette Davis as a Southern woman who lives in a mansion and thinks she is going insane (both Joan Crawford and Davis were to appear, but Crawford left the film).
He made the all-male action film The Flight of the Phoenix (1965).
Aldrich had his biggest hit to date with The Dirty Dozen (1967). The success of The Dirty Dozen allowed him to establish his own film production studio for some time.
He made The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), then The Killing of Sister George (1968). He produced but did not direct What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969).
He produced and directed Too Late the Hero (1970) and The Grissom Gang (1971). In a 1972 interview he said that:
<blockwuote>Lasting power is the most important power. Especially in this business, staying at the plate or staying at the table, staying in the game, is the essential. You can't allow yourself to get passed over or pushed aside. Very, very talented people got pushed aside and remained unused... If you must make a choice between luck and talent, you have to opt for luck. It's nice to have some of both, or a lot of both; but if you can't, luck is the answer. Nowhere else more so than in this business. The right place, the right time, the right script, all the right auspices-they made the difference to directors, writers, actors.[52]
He directed only Ulzana's Raid (1972) and Emperor of the North Pole (1973), both of which were box office disappointments.
Aldrich's commercial fortunes were revived after he had two hits starring Burt Reynolds: The Longest Yard (1974) and Hustle (1975).
He did a thriller Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) and a comedy, The Choirboys (1977).
His last movies were comedies, The Frisco Kid (1979) and ...All the Marbles (1981).
From his marriage to Harriet Foster (1941–1965), Aldrich had four children, all of whom work in the film business—Adell, William, Alida and Kelly. In 1966, after divorcing Harriet, he married fashion model Sibylle Siegfried.
Film critic John Patterson summarized his career in 2012: "He was a punchy, caustic, macho and pessimistic director, who depicted corruption and evil unflinchingly, and pushed limits on violence throughout his career. His aggressive and pugnacious film-making style, often crass and crude, but never less than utterly vital and alive, warrants — and will richly reward — your immediate attention."[61]
Aldrich died of kidney failure on December 5, 1983 in a Los Angeles hospital.
In 2012, John Patterson of The Guardian commented that Aldrich is "a wonderful director nearly 30 years dead now, whose body of work is in danger of slipping over the horizon."[61] Japanese film director Kiyoshi Kurosawa noted Aldrich's influence on him.[62]
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